On Friday 04 July 2008, Johnny Hughes wrote:
Kevin Thorpe wrote:
I'm having a spot of bother with a large (900GB) partition.
fdisk claims it's 900GB. I made an ext3 fs on it and df says it's only 94GB. Which is correct? Or did I do something wrong?
If this partition is on a LARGER drive, you may need to use parted and not fdisk to create your partitions. Large drives need gpt labels and are not able to be partitioned with fdisk.
Put differently, if you run fdisk on a device >2T fdisks behaviour is undefined. It will commonly create broken layouts without logging any error messages. All this because fdisk only uses msdos-style partition tables which by design doesn't work for >2T devices. Of course the worst part of all this is fdisks complete lack of error checking...
I your device/drive is not larger than 2T then this theory falls.
/Peter
However, that is not usually a problem with 900GB drive.